Alec Worrell-Welch’s Reviews > After the Worst Day Ever: What Sick Kids Know About Sustaining Hope in Chronic Illness > Status Update

“Choosing Trust” felt like an abstract idea at first, but Bidwell breaks it down into 5 elements (positivity, gratitude, maturity, love, purpose) that are modeled and taught by consistent, dependable people who model trust and encourage hopeful dreams and actions. Material, sociopolitical, psychosocial, and spiritual elements comprise the “soil” in which trust grows. Mature trust “redefines normal.”

Hard-hitting words that give hope a concrete texture. His work with kids suffering from renal failure convinced him that hope grows in the landscape of despair—when other people embrace the whole of sickness-interrupted and -redefined life, alongside the one who is suffering. Connection is what waters and tends hope—but only amid the suffering, never abstracted from it. This makes me wonder about pastoral care.

Learning to understand, receive, and enact hope from chronically or terminally ill children. The author brings together experience and expertise in pastoral care, psychology, and broad theology & spirituality and then lets kids’ reorient these according to how they inhabit and make sense of the world. It seems promising.